This invention relates generally to the field of games. Various types of games are known to the prior art and include games of pure chance, such as roulette, bartering types of games, such as "Monopoly", memory games, such as "Concentration", games where one team member elicits proper answers from teammates by giving various types of clues, such as "charades" or "password", and others. Each of these popular games is competitive, and scoring or movement of a player marker along a gameboard is determined by chance or by player response. In each of these games known to the prior art, however, the scoring or player movement is determined according to an "all-or-nothing" rule. That is to say, in games where player judgment or response is required, the answer has only one of two answer values -- a correct response or an incorrect response.
In none of the games of the prior art is scoring or player movement determined by a player response to a question where the responses may each take a relative answer value, i.e., "most correct", "acceptable", "unacceptable", or "grossly unacceptable". The present invention provides for such scoring.
In the field of games heretofore known, no game deals specifically with the subject of dream interpretation. This area has been the subject of study by man for thousands of years. In many societies there have been selected members such as shamans, medicine men, and others, who the society believed to be gifted or skilled in dream interpretation. The meaning of an individual's dream was considered important, for instance as an augury or hidden truth concerning the dreamer or communication from the dead.
Current studies estimate that people spend about twenty percent of their sleeping time dreaming. They dream four or five times a night, and each dream lasts about twenty minutes. Consequently, everyone has a variety of dreams which may be subject to interpretation.
There is no certain way of interpreting dreams, and, in fact, any dream interpretation is hypothetical. A variety of distinct schools of thought have developed as followers of, for instance, Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Frederick Perls. Consequently, therapists variously identify themselves with differing theories of dream interpretation and structure their analyses accordingly.
A wealth of literature is available on the subject of psychoanalysis, psychology, and dream interpretation presenting in academic fashion certain theories of analysis and their necessary framework for dream interpretation. While this material has been presented in literary form or through lectures, both in an academic context, it has not heretofore been the subject of a game.